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This industry is different in that the workers are also creators. Musicians take what is written on a page and do something creative with it. There is always a ton of detail that is left out of music, and it's up to the performers to fill in that detail. Claude Debussy said that "music is the space between the notes."

Beethoven was the first composer to provide actual tempo markings (as in, 120 beats per minute, as opposed to just saying "Allegro" or whatever). Before him it was up to the performers to figure out how fast something should go based upon a couple words. As things progressed, composers added more and more detail to their works. Look at some works by Mahler or Hindemith and there is a lot more detail there. But even then, they're leaving out a ridiculous amount of information that's being filled in by the best judgement of trained musicians who understand the styles they're playing.

Yeah, technology helps composers create works faster and more easily. But I don't think most composers would be very happy having their works performed by machines at this point. The machines just aren't yet capable of sounding that interesting.

That's like saying that C++ is a poisoned platform because not all the libraries written in C++ are fully open.

So Microsoft has created this fantastic platform, and they've opened up.NET and C# so it can be used this way. That doesn't mean they have to open up every single library they create. There is a difference between the language/runtime and a single library. I feel like you anti-Mono people are just searching for any reason you can to hate on Mono, and it makes no sense.

Microsoft has a lot invested in a lot of things other than.NET, so I think you're making a really large leap here to assume that they're talking about.NET here. Every major software company out there has invested into different things, and they'll protect their IP up to the point where it no longer benefits them to restrict it.

It's in Microsoft's best interests to allow people to use.NET and C# everywhere, period. They've already stated that they're applying the Community Promise to their patents so that they won't sue people over them.

Mono, the framework, is fantastic and it's really sad that RMS and the BoycottNovell tards are spreading so much FUD over it. And that some of you here on Slashdot are perpetuating that.

Last year at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit, Cody Russell asked Richard Stallman if there was anything that Microsoft could do to ease his fears of patent threats, and he said that there was. Microsoft could come out and publicly state that.NET was open to use and promise not to sue people over it. Days later they did exactly that and Richard did not change his opinion.

Try playing Quake 4 on nvidia Fermi using VESA and let me know how you get on.
Seriously, for many people out there Quake 4 is just not a reasonable measure of a video chip. I don't play Quake 4 on my Linux machine. If I want to play video games I go fire up the PS3 or plug a monitor into my Windows box and turn it on.
I do basically everything else in Linux now. I don't need insane graphics to do it. I need something good enough to run mutter or compiz, and ideally I'd love to have something with KMS support. That's really about it.

Google? I'm a big Google fan (and despite the rest of my comment, also a big Android fan and totally love my Nexus One).. but if Google was so hardcore into efficiency, why the hell did they develop a new runtime for their Android that's based on Java?

Google didn't seem like the best company to praise for efficiency. I would have picked some sort of video game company like id Software (yeah, I realize this an apples and oranges comparison though).

What would be the upside of changing the name? It's still going to be the same software, it's going to do at least as much as it does now... but you think it's somehow going to be better because it has a different name?? Should GNOME change its name to something a little less garden-variety, or a little less dungeons and dragonsy? KDE doesn't even really mean anything (at least the K doesn't), so should it change its name so it makes more sense to you?

No, it's not moved to universe. It's still in main. It's only being removed from the install CD and the default install. Yes, it sucks that you now have to download it if you're really using it, but you also have to realize that the install CD is *extremely* packed already and it's getting very hard to find a few remaining bytes to add things that Ubuntu considers more important to the default install and experience.

Depends on the features of.NET that the language uses. IronRuby and IronPython depend upon the DLR, which probably can't be used in an AOT environment like MonoTouch needs because things like Reflection don't work. Remember, when you compile native code with AOT you drop the runtime so there is some give and take in terms of what you get out of it. It's faster, but you lose some runtime features.

Mono has always been very up front about the incompatibilities that exist. And whenever you're building AOT applications you have to expect that certain features (like Reflection) will not work. So who cares? It's still a fantastic platform.

It probably just hooks into the reference counting mechanisms. This is basically what the bindings for gtk# do. GObject contains its own reference counting scheme, and when you're finished with an object you call g_object_unref() on it. When you're using the C# binding then it does this internally and you don't ever worry about it. When a variable changes its reference or when it falls out of scope or whatever, then gtk# unrefs the object.

It may not be THAT much better than native Objective-C. But if you're a new developer who has been using C# for a long time and doesn't know Objective-C yet, this could be a great tool to help you write an iPhone app really quickly and comfortably. This isn't intended to be anything revolutionary, it's just a C# binding for people who care about that.